Winterlight
by Chaotic Century
Summary: Rinn has spent the last seven years struggling to resolve questions to which there are no answers. Closure may be elusive, but perhaps there are other ways to move forward. A one-shot set in the Battle Story timeline.


**Author's Note:** This story takes place in the Battle Story timeline and is set on the Central Continent, Delpoi, in ZAC 2039. I am grateful as always to my fiancé Tigerhawk for an impressive amount of research assistance that enabled me to establish a canonical background and framework. However, I did employ a bit of artistic license for a couple of minor details, and I take complete responsibility for any factual errors. Corrections for same are welcomed.  
Credit for a couple of lovely turns of phrase towards the end of the piece go to Ronan Harris of the band VNV Nation, and his ageless song, "Perpetual."  
I deeply appreciate your readership and hope you enjoy.

 **DEDICATION  
** _For Tigerhawk, lightbearer of my heart_

* * *

"You win some, you lose some."

Rinn stood well back from the crowds congregating thickly along the curb, innumerable lit candles held aloft in their hands. An unoccupied space against the front wall of a cafe and its adjacent alleyway provided an open spot for her spare frame, a small respite amid the sheer numbers.

"But as long as you have a chance, then there's still hope."

She leaned on the cafe's sand-colored stucco wall. Its solidity pressing back against her shoulders proved reassuring at a moment when she was in dire need of reassurance.

"And there is _always_ a chance. So that means that there's always hope. Never forget that, Rinnie."

These words, uttered nearly a decade prior, came to her unbidden, as they so often did. It was so long ago now that she had wondered more than once if they were a true, unfiltered memory, or if her brain were simply weaving its own threads in some childish attempt at self-comfort.

The revelers thronging the open sidewalk ahead were riveted by the sights and sounds of the street parade winding past between where they stood and the mayoral viewing stand on the other side of the avenue. Even in her agitated state, Rinn was able to appreciate the excitement. New recruits, most nearly Rinn's own age, stepped smartly past in unison, their young faces bright and determined and gazing rigidly ahead. They earned hearty cheers from the assembled crowd; despite the Republic's recent massive victory, much work remained yet to be done, and the war was far from over. These young soldiers deserved the encouragement and would perhaps be needing it in the months and years to come.

Several small Zoids trundled past in turn, their cosmetic damage and battle scars so fresh that they must have recently returned from the battlefield. A proud contingent of soldiers, noticeably more tired-looking than the previous group, followed: veterans of this latest triumph in the war. The crowd roared their gratitude and approval.

Rinn rubbed an old coin in her pocket with trembling fingers. What few rough edges it had once had had long since been worn away into a comforting smoothness. It was a totem, of sorts, one that she always carried with her as a reminder of chances and of faith, of hope never truly being conquering by despair.

Where could she _be_?

Did she still believe she had a chance, even now? Even after all this time?

There was no use pursuing these questions; there was no telling how many times Rinn had pondered them over the years. There were no answers to be had.

Then, more pressingly - why had Rinn come today? She had never attended before; it was too painful. So why had she now? A vision of gentle blue eyes gazing at her earlier that afternoon flashed before her, and she shook her head.

"Thank you for joining me for this year's Winterlight Festival!" a woman's voice boomed suddenly from across the street. Rinn was only startled for as long as it took her to notice that the parade had concluded and the mayor was now addressing the assembled attendees. Many more people had arrived, gathering in the street and closely about the viewing stand so as to better hear the forthcoming speeches.

As was traditional, the mayor was wearing all white. She cast her gaze over the multitudes and continued, "As you all know, the Winterlight Festival is our time, as proud citizens of the Helic Republic, to mark the defeat of the Zenebas forces seven years ago in the Battle of Ardannes. Our victory came on the winter solstice, the Republic's day of greatest darkness, but each year we take this day to celebrate the triumph of the light!"

The crowd bellowed its approval, raising their candles high. A sea of small, flickering flames danced before Rinn. She suddenly realized she was barely breathing. She was terrified of what was about to happen - except she didn't even know what was about to happen. A sole figure walked past between her and the back of the crowd ahead but then stopped, looking in her direction; she took no notice.

"During Winterlight we solemnly remember the sacrifices of our brave military," the mayor went on. "They volunteered their safety, security, their own minds and bodies - sometimes their very lives - to defend the freedom and prosperity that the Republic stands for. Whether these heroes live among us now or were laid to rest in our precious soil, please join me now in honoring the veterans of the Battle of Ardannes - let us cheer for them!"

"No," Rinn whispered. How could the mayor have forgotten - ?

"Cheer so loud that our brave heroes can hear you in every village and city of Delpoi, and from their places of repose among the stars!"

"No!" There were more soldiers who served in the forest of Ardannes than those who had come home and those who had been killed in action! How could this foolish woman not see that, not pay her respects to their heroism, too? "The prisoners!" Rinn shrieked, both fury and grief bubbling over within her. "You forgot the prisoners of war!"

Her anguished cries were unheard among the massive onrush of voices heeding the mayor's call.

"But today is our most special Winterlight yet, for we celebrate too the architects of the Republic's latest victory!" the mayor now shouted. "Please welcome the commander of the Sixth Division, newly returned from the battle that drove our enemies all the way back to the Dark Continent - please welcome the bright light of the Morning Stars!"

A keening, haunting Zoid cry drowned out the bellows of the adoring crowd, echoing down the city blocks and shaking every parade-goer down to their marrow. A thundering step was heard, and another, and the wondering eyes of the crowd beheld the shining skeletal head of a mighty Ultrasaurus appearing around the corner of a nearby building.

The adulations of the mayor, of her council, of the thousands of attendees that day rose to a cheering crescendo, so loud they could probably be heard all the way from the wild and untamed shores of Europa, but Rinn did not hear, did not even notice the flow of people around her as everyone moved to clear a path for the scarred, skyscraper-sized Zoid making its slow and deliberate way towards the viewing stand.

"No, no, no, how could you have forgotten her?" Rinn sobbed into her hands, heeding nothing, not even her precious coin falling from between her fingers. Her legs were shaky beneath her, and dark clouds swam at the edges of her vision. "How could you have forgotten her?" She summoned up all of the strength she had left for the scream rushing like acid up her throat, the scream she needed the mayor and all of the assembled local dignitaries to hear. " _How could you have forgotten her?!_ "

"Hey, hey, Rinn, hey." Rinn found herself suddenly scooped up in strong arms just as she was about to collapse to the cobblestone, utterly spent. Someone was steadying her back on her feet, holding her upper arms. "Rinn. Look at me. Are you okay? Do you need help?"

She gazed up at whomever had stopped her from falling.

Gentle blue eyes.

"You," she managed to croak.

 **-.-.-.-  
**

Earlier that afternoon, Rinn had been in her studio hunched over her latest work. Her deft hands were capable of bringing exceptional painted creations to life on nearly any pottery piece imaginable: if she could spin it on her potter's wheel or shape it with her hands and then fire it in her kiln, it was a blank canvas upon which she could work her magic.

Considering her age, Rinn's level of renown was quite extraordinary. She had acquired her skills with sculpting and throwing at a young age, as both her parents had dabbled in ceramics as a hobby. But she had not put brush to clay until the age of thirteen, and once she had begun painting, she had simply never stopped. Now, "the twenty-year old potter," as she was called, was known for many miles around. Her pieces, usually featuring dreamy landscapes or intricate, phantasmagorical animals, drew interested collectors from great distances to the little pottery on the outskirts of her small city.

As was her custom, Rinn scarcely looked up from her work when the cheerful bell at the top of her studio door announced the arrival of a customer. "Let me know if you need anything," she said to whoever had entered. It wasn't that she was being rude; she simply did not wish to lose the visions she so often held in her mind's eye that she then channeled onto the bisqueware. She saw fields and peaks and oceans sparkling in the starlight, and magical creatures running and playing and hiding, and always, always there lurking in the back of her consciousness, the black forest.

Always, the black forest.

"Incredible," her visitor breathed, as though to himself. Rinn's eyes flickered up from the bisqueware platter she was attempting to paint just long enough to register the presence of a man with dark curly hair. He was facing away from her, hands clasped behind his back, and was slowly, reverently walking along the display shelves, examining the pieces for sale. She returned her gaze back to her work, hoping this solitary word would mark the end of the conversation, at least until any transaction were to take place. In this hope, she was disappointed.

"You make all these?"

Rinn got this question a lot. "Yes." She considered the angle of light the sun was casting upon this landscape in progress. It felt warm, and joyful - but there was nothing in the composition to suggest any reason to feel happiness. No magical creature gallivanting along, drinking in the wind and its own freedom. No buds emerging in a blooming of color to herald the coming of spring. All there was was a woman, standing quite alone in the middle of a vast plain. Rinn did not often include Zoidians in her art, but it was almost as if this woman had asked to be painted, and so Rinn had painted her.

The woman's expression was indecipherable, even to its creator. Why was the woman standing there? What was her hand, raised slightly from her side, seeming to reach for? Why wasn't she happy to be in this beautiful land beneath a benevolent sun? In spite of that pleasant sunlight, everything felt barren. Nothing felt right.

"You're kind of making me feel like a slacker," the man joked, interrupting her ruminations yet again. "I figure I have to be about your age, but I don't think I've accomplished anything half so wonderful as all of this!"

Frustrated with her piece, not to mention the continuance of the conversation, Rinn finally looked up. The man - the young man - was, indeed, about her age. He had arrestingly blue eyes, but they were regarding her with a serene kindness. "You really are as talented as they say," he said quietly. "I feel like I could just step into these scenes."

"Thank you," she said, still looking at him. His face held the kind of warmth that the sun on her platter did. On whom, she wondered, did he bestow that wondrous light?

He placidly held her gaze.

On _her_?

"I'm Keane, by the way."

"Rinn," she replied automatically. She shook her head, frustrated again. Obviously she was Rinn. It said so on the sign right outside of her studio. No one came here who didn't already know who she was.

"Yes, I had figured as much," he said with a small chuckle. "It's very nice to meet you." He glanced outside. Even accounting for the early sunset on the solstice, it had still been unusually dark that day, due to the stubborn cloud cover. Perhaps that was what led him to ask. "Will you be attending the festival downtown this evening?"

"No," she said, shaking her head. "I never do."

"Ah. That's a shame. It's always felt very special to me. I think that hope is something worthy of celebration, don't you?"

Rinn reached automatically for the smooth coin in her pocket. "Yes."

"Well, perhaps you'll change your mind sometime. Until then, I'd like to purchase that plate there, please."

Rinn looked to where he was pointing. Her eyebrows went up. "That one?"

The plate in question had stood on the display shelf for quite some time. It was one of her rare abstract pieces; the design used black glaze and the ivory-colored negative space of the twice-fired clay to create a kind of dancing tension between light and darkness. She retrieved it from the shelf and took his money.

"I'll carry it myself, thank you," he said when she went to fetch paper for wrapping up the plate securely for travel. "Thank you very much, Rinn."

She nodded a bit dazedly, and watched him go, the bell over the door tinkling a farewell. A weak sunbeam managed to fight its way through the clouds choking the sky just then and alight upon her platter. She gazed at the plain's expansive emptiness, her heart heavy.

-.-.-.-

"Come on, Rinn. Come on."

Rinn allowed herself to be led away from the teeming crowds, which were growing alarmingly in number around them as people continued clearing off of the street to make way for the approaching Ultrasaurus. A jingling bell not dissimilar to the one at her studio told her that Keane had drawn her into the cafe she had been standing beside.

She sat heavily in the chair he pulled out for her at a small table in the back of the dining area, well away from the other patrons, and wiped her eyes, feeling hollow and miserable. Tears were still ceaselessly leaking down her cheeks.

"Okay. You're okay. Just take a few deep breaths." He sat down opposite her. "Excuse me, waiter? Two cups of tea, please."

Rinn struggled to calm her breath, but the sobs bottled up inside seemed to spasm out of her of their own accord. She reached for her coin, dependable scrap of comfort that it was, then her heart nearly stopped.

Her pocket was empty.

"My coin," she gasped. "My coin! It's gone!"

"No, no, no, it's okay. I saw you drop it before." Keane took it out of his own pocket and handed it to her.

"Oh," she said, gratefully fingering its familiar contours, too overwhelmed to add anything further.

"What's going on, Rinn? Are you alright?"

"Yes. No." She took a deep breath, steadying herself. "I - I don't know that you could possibly understand."

He entwined his hands and set them calmly on the table. "Try me."

She wiped her eyes again. "The - the mayor," she stammered. "She forgot them. The prisoners of war. In her speech. She forgot them."

To her surprise, Keane was nodding, as though he had quite expected her to be saying this. "An innocent oversight, I'm sure. But not a harmless one." The waiter came to their table, setting down the tea they'd ordered, and Keane waited until he'd gone before continuing. "If you don't mind my asking, whom did you lose in the Ardannes?"

"My mother," Rinn murmured. She had placed the coin upon the table and was rotating it slowly between her thumb and forefinger, around and around. Chances. Hope. These abstract concepts didn't seem real. After seven long years without a word or even a clue as to her whereabouts or fate, it didn't seem possible that her mother had any chances left.

"It's not even so much the actual loss, is it?" Keane asked. He tilted his head to rest his cheek against his hand. "It's the not knowing. The lack of closure."

Rinn nodded. "Even to this day, I don't know that I've completely stopped hoping she'll simply appear at my house one day, maybe in bandages, maybe in a wheelchair, but alive." She sniffled. "It's terrible...not knowing if she's even still alive." She watched the steam curling up from their mugs of tea; each stream swirled around the other until they joined. "I have no day to mark, no grave to visit, no knowledge of what happened. Nothing but this coin." She held it up, studying it. "It was the only one of her personal effects besides her Zoid itself that happened to be left behind when she was taken by the Zenebas forces. I'm lucky one of her comrades even was able to find it in that awful place."

"Have you ever been there?" Keane asked.

"Where, the Ardannes forest?" He nodded. "No, just in visions and nightmares. Why? Have you?"

He nodded again. "I have, actually. It's an important place for my family as well. For years, it haunted me, the same way that it sounds like it's haunted you."

"But why? Did you know someone who saw action in that battle?"

"My father. He was in command of the initial ambush."

Rinn could hardly believe her ears. She stared at him, tears and anguish nearly forgotten. "Your father...is Captain Balan?"

"Yes. So you see, I understand more than you might expect, about how you feel."

Rinn considered this. Her tea was no longer steaming. She took a tentative sip; it was just right. "What happened to him? I thought he was one of the ones who survived the battle."

"He was. But he was never the same afterward; something there really changed him. We may have won, but it was hardly resounding...more like by a Gurantula's thread. I don't think he was able to cope with whatever it was that he saw or did during that battle. He committed suicide a couple of years ago."

"I'm so sorry," Rinn murmured. Keane had told her this sadly, yet also very matter-of-factly. What did he know that she didn't, about finding closure? "So why did you go to the forest, then?" she asked. "Weren't you afraid of what you might find there?" The cafe was growing more crowded. The speeches outside had probably concluded.

"I was very afraid, actually, of what kind of hellish place it could be, to have affected my father so."

Rinn waited while he took a few sips of his tea. Finally, she couldn't help herself. "So was it? Hellish?"

Keane gave her a small smile. "No, actually. It was quite beautiful. I must have just stood in that forest for hours, the sunlight slanting through the trees onto my back. It was quiet, and cool, and damp, and a little bit melancholy, too, I think. It was like the trees, and the forest itself, remembered what had happened there."

Prison bars were always how Rinn had pictured those trees, hemming in her mother's Zoid, precluding escape, looming over her like malevolent beings. But now, even as Keane was speaking, Rinn was finding it harder and harder to envision the Ardannes as they had always appeared in her imagination: the air thick with terror, rain falling in sheets so thick you couldn't see your Zoid's forearm, the black night savagely torn open by lightning, over and over and over. Instead, it was almost as if she could inhale the moist air, hear the nearby drip of water sliding off of ancient branches and down to the leaf litter below. It seemed like a peaceful place. How could something have happened there that was so terrible it had reverberated down through all these years?

There were no answers to such a question.

"Rinn."

She started. "What?"

"If your mother served under my father, then it must have been because she was an exceptional woman and pilot." Rinn blinked away fresh tears. "I'm sorry circumstances have prevented you from finding closure. Maybe someday you'll visit the Ardannes, too, and you'll see that it's...rather a lovely place."

Her dreams and waking moments had been haunted by the black forest for so long that it had simply never occurred to her that it could be anything _but_ a nightmare. But perhaps her grief had blinded her.

"Maybe." She rubbed her eyes and sighed. "I'm spent."

"It was very brave of you to come to the festival. I feel bad for having suggested it now; if I'd known what it represented to you, I'm not sure I would have." He drained the last of his tea and set the mug down, politely ignoring the fact that Rinn had barely touched hers.

She managed a small smile and shyly looked over at him. "But maybe...it's good that you did."

He smiled back at her, and she admired, yet again, those gentle blue eyes.

 **-.-.-.-**

They'd left most of the revelry-filled city behind for the quieter dirt paths leading to the surrounding countryside. It was only another five minutes' walk from here to her studio, and beside it, her modest farmhouse.

"Are you going to be alright?" Keane stopped as the paved road ended.

"Yes." And she was.

He paused, then asked, "May I call on you again?"

She smiled up at him. In the light of the three moons, his fair skin and shining blue eyes made him seem ethereal. "I'd like that."

He took her hand for just a moment in silent acknowledgment of the happiness her answer gave him, and in that split second, Rinn knew what her platter had been missing. "Then good night, Rinn. And," he added, in the traditional Winterlight expression of parting and hope, "through the storm fronts we will ever surely pass, to stand as never-ending light."

"Let there always be never-ending light," she replied, in the traditional response.

Keane raised a hand in farewell, turned back towards the city, and was soon lost in the soft darkness.

Rinn turned, too, towards home. The moons and stars seemed more beautiful than ever tonight, and she wondered if they always been that way, and she had simply never noticed.

Stepping into her yard several minutes later, she passed a badly damaged Godos. It had stood in the back corner next to the fence for so long that plant life had utilized its legs and tail as ladders in their quest to unfurl themselves ever closer to the sun. All was quiet, as it always was, and as she always did, she said softly to the eternally slumbering creature, the Zoid that had given its life trying to protect her mother, "Rest well, good night."

Rinn was tired, and drained from all that had happened, but it wasn't time to go to bed just yet. She ignored the front door to her farmhouse and instead headed into her studio, where she sat down at the work table. The platter was just as she had left it.

There was no doubt that, in her twenty years, she had certainly lost some.

But she had won some, too.

Rinn picked up a pencil and began lightly sketching the outlines of a second figure to be added to the scene, hand-in-hand with the first: a joyous little girl, smiling radiantly up at her mother.


End file.
